Former veterinarian asks court to toss out beating conviction

Bill Gang

Friday, Jan. 21, 2000 | 10:51 a.m.

The former Henderson veterinarian convicted of attempted murder in the near-fatal beating of a fellow veterinarian has asked the Nevada Supreme Court not only to overturn the conviction but to completely dismiss the case.

Alan Ruegamer's attorney, Lew Wolfbrandt, contends that Ruegamer had an alibi to the 1994 beating of Dr. James Reilly at an abandoned house in northwest Las Vegas where he had been lured through a fictitious phone call.

But an e-mail that Ruegamer said could have proved his innocence was never located because of what Wolfbrandt said was a series of changes in attorneys prompted by improper challenges from prosecutors.

Deputy District Attorney Tamara Beatty-Peterson denied that prosecutors did anything other than question Ruegamer's purported poverty status because required documents were never filed.

The e-mail was said to have been generated by a secretary with the city of Henderson, where Ruegamer said he was leaving his new telephone number for a friend, Stephanie Oaks, at the time of the crime was being committed.

But Oaks' secretary doesn't remember typing the e-mail, and the woman who was the recipient couldn't find her copy.

Beatty-Peterson argued to the justices that the story of the "mysteriously lost" e-mail was "inherently untrustworthy and suspicious" and not grounds for reversal of the conviction.

Wolfbrandt said none of Ruegamer's lawyers ever managed to hire investigators to seek the elusive e-mail before they were taken off the case. He said the parade of lawyers resulted in part because prosecutors complained that private attorneys should not be court appointed when the public defender's office was available.

Wolfbrandt said that during the appeal process an investigation finally focused on the elusive e-mail and while Oaks said she remembered the message, a copy of the document to confirm her story could never be found in city records.

The e-mail, Wolfbrandt said, was generated on a Henderson city computer, but the computer was purged after a year. A back-up disk finally was located years after the May 24, 1994, incident, but it had deteriorated and no information could be retrieved, the lawyer said.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case in the next few weeks.

Ruegamer was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and his co-defendant, Jacqueline Demaria, was sentenced to four years.

Reilly, whose halting speech and deliberate movements are evidence of the baseball-bat beating he endured, said at their trials that while he still has memory problems, he clearly remembers being victimized by Ruegamer and Demaria. Reilly was lured to the home on the pretense of sedating a cat for travel.

Ruegamer had been Reilly's partner, but the relationship dissolved into an angry feud.

Ruegamer tried to have criminal charges filed against Reilly over $13,000 in disputed office equipment. Reilly, by then, had become a key witness against Ruegamer in a probe by the Board of Veterinary Examiners over allegations of practicing medicine without a license.

Although Reilly had been left for dead after the beating, he regained consciousness and began driving for help. He was found by investigators with the Board for Veterinary Medical Examiners, who had received a call from his wife that he hadn't returned from a house call.